


that's not my name

by barrybinary



Series: Trans Eddie Brock [1]
Category: Marvel, Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Other, Trans Male Character, Transphobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-02
Updated: 2018-11-02
Packaged: 2019-08-14 18:27:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16497908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/barrybinary/pseuds/barrybinary
Summary: Eddie's dad calls.





	that's not my name

**Author's Note:**

> **No proofread. Only publish.**

Eddie looked down at his body; months of not being able to afford his hormone treatments had really gotten to him. 

But he could see his body fat moving back to his thighs instead of his stomach, he saw his face getting softer and felt his skin doing the same.

It wasn’t that he didn’t look “male” anymore — he knew he passed as well as any cis man out there. His facial hair, relatively square shoulders, decent sized biceps, and masculine hairline all gave him the appearance of a cis man. 

Living as stealth meant the public didn’t care about his gender, but it also meant he had to be  _ careful _ of what he said around people who didn’t know, which were  _ most _ . 

However, no matter how stealth he was, he couldn’t keep his father from referring to him in the right way.

With his money from the Life Foundation case, he’d guessed his father would be calling him any minute. Even with that knowledge, his pulse still skyrocketed when he saw his father’s name appear on his phone. Venom came to the forefront of his awareness, an almost comforting presence in the face of what was to come. 

**Bad person?** Venom thought excitedly. Eddie’s mouth started watering, making him grimace and tell Venom  _ Stop it, _ in his head. He’d gotten better at non-verbal communication in their couple months of living together, which was much better than talking to him out loud where others could hear it. 

He would never forget the face of an old woman who overheard him talking to Venom about eating death row inmates and how it would be  _ bad _ , but he was mostly surprised that she hadn’t reported him to the police.

Venom broadcasted his disappointment, making Eddie sigh. 

Well, the phone wouldn’t ring forever. 

“Hey, dad.” He felt Venom perk up. 

“Hey, Alison-” 

“Yeah, no,” Eddie said, turning his phone off and trying to swallow the dysphoria consuming him. Like bile in the back of his throat, he couldn’t wash it away. 

**Eddie? Eddie, why do we feel like this?**

Ignoring his other, Eddie raced to a nearby alleyway, trying to get out of anyone’s sight. He sat down on the dirty cement, his face tucked into his knees as he tried to breathe.

**_Eddie. Eddie. Eddie. Eddie. Eddie,_ ** the symbiote repeated, curling over Eddie’s skin as though he could protect him from his own emotions. 

To Eddie’s surprise… it  _ did _ help. Venom’s not-quite flesh rubbed against the skin of his arms, against the back of his neck, petting him and soothing him. 

“He knows that’s not my name. He  _ knows _ ,” Eddie said, his throat hoarse from the effort of trying not to cry.

Venom was perplexed, Eddie could feel it. He hadn’t learned anything about transgender issues while jumping from host to host in Carlton Drake’s lab. Unless he dug into Anne’s thoughts and memories, he wouldn’t have known anything was different about Eddie.

**Eddie is different. Eddie is with us — Special.**

“No, it’s not — It’s not…”  _ It’s not good _ , was what he wanted to say, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t call being trans  _ bad _ , even if it had to do with why he was upset now. It wasn’t being trans itself that were bad, it was what other people did about it and how they viewed him because of it.

The only woman who saw him as nothing but a man was Anne, and… that was over.

He supposed it was Anne’s acceptance that Venom didn’t know there was anything different about him, gender-wise.

**You are good, Eddie.** A tendril of Venom’s came up to loving stroke his cheek, making Eddie smile as a tear finally slid out onto his cheek. 

“You don’t understand,” Eddie said softly, hoping no one who walked by would be able to hear him. 

**No, we understand. It is** **_you_ ** **who does not understand.**

Eddie hummed out a questioning sound. 

**We know what you know. And we know that doesn’t make you any worse than any other human. You are the only human for us. Not because of your physical ability to bond.**

**Because you** **_are_ ** **Eddie.**

Eddie let out a dry sob, overcome with emotion — both from him and the alien bonded to his every cell. “You don’t really know what you’re talking about,” Eddie said, but did  _ Eddie _ know what  _ he  _ was talking about? Why was he arguing with an alien, who doesn’t have biological sex, about his gender and why it made him different from the rest of the population?

What did it matter? As long as Venom saw him as  _ him _ , why did anything else matter? 

**We will never call you that name, that** **_wrong_ ** **name,** Venom said abruptly, and Eddie paid attention to an emotion that’d been sitting under his skin since the call with his father.

_ Anger _ .

“He usually doesn’t call,” Eddie said to the symbiote that still lay over his skin. “And he doesn’t like seeing me — doesn’t like looking at me.” 

That only served to make the symbiote angrier.

“He doesn’t like seeing  _ Eddie _ , he wants to see… who I was before. But there was no before? There was only confusion.” Thoughts coming out of his mouth, half-formed, Eddie sat up a little straighter and let his head hit the brick behind him. 

Venom delved a little deeper into what Eddie was thinking, Eddie closing his eyes and letting him in his mind. It wasn’t often he did this, but he found the more he did it, the more he grew to appreciate the symbiote. He was getting used to always having someone in his head.

When Venom went through a person’s emotions and memories, that person got little snapshots. Little snippets of memories flashing behind Eddie’s eyelids, he cringed when he saw himself looking in a mirror. Except,  _ it wasn’t him _ . 

It was the little girl he was told he had to be, from the moment he was born, by a dad who didn’t love him even before he was  _ him _ .

**You were sad.**

Eddie let out a harsh laugh. “Yeah, you can say that again.”

**We don't like your father.**

“Yeah.”

**Let us take you home,** Venom said, his face materializing from Eddie’s shoulder and stretching out till they were face-to-face. His face no longer freaked him out, now it only gave him comfort. 

Venom would always be there for him.

**Yes.**

Eddie smiled at the symbiote before stretching forward to plant a kiss on his teeth. It didn't hurt, since he only felt the sides of them and not the sharp point, but with how satisfied and  _ warm _ Venom felt, he thought he wouldn't have minded at all if he did end up getting cut. 

Then, he relinquished control to Venom, letting the symbiote thread himself through every one of his muscles, watching as he took them both home. 


End file.
